/ 15 March 2004

Towards a policy revolution

The Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) encyclopaedic Human Resource Development Review 2003: Education, Employment and Skills in South Africa, which was launched last week, is a milestone in coming to terms with apartheid’s most dangerous legacy — the underdevelopment of the capacity of the South African majority.

The review breaks with the high-skill, high-niche model of advanced industrialised countries, recognising there is a growing informalisation of work, large-scale unemployment and a legacy of under-investment in human development. It suggests the economy should be seen as multi-layered with high-, intermediate- and low-skill bands.

It points to a growing dualism in the economy. The one strand is modern and relatively well-developed, President Thabo Mbeki suggested in last year’s State of the Nation address, while the other is characterised by underdevelopment and an “entrenched crisis of poverty”. The review argues that the skills problem is not located only at the high-skill end, but also in terms of intermediate- and low-skill needs.

Executive director of the human resource development research programme at the HSRC Andre Kraak suggests that key institutions are “out of sync” and, in some cases, work against each other. He recommends that the government, employers and civil society work together in a more coordinated way.

In each sphere there is the need for a more aggressive joining-up of economic, industrial, firm-based, and education and training policies to create one overarching economic and human resources develop- ment strategy for the medium to long term.

For example, in the youth market, formal sector jobs have not increased at the same rate as the school system. In the workplace, the export sector is leaving behind the much larger worker population with intermediate and low skills. And as South Africa moves to grow the economy by increasing exports, its science system weakens, undermining attempts to improve human resources.

A gap that should be filled in the next review, due in three years’ time, is a more nuanced understanding of how “the worlds of work” are being transformed by intensified competition.

Three trajectories can be identified. There are those in the core who benefit from global integration through opportunities created by liberalisation. Their workplaces are being transformed by new human resources initiatives, including quality circles, teamwork, productivity-linked wages, profit-sharing, performance-based rewards and, above all, skills development.

Then there are those who are being pushed into more precarious and intensive working conditions because of global competition, such as workers in casual and outsourced work.

Finally, there are those who worked in factories forced to close down in sectors such as footwear and textiles, who are now in informal work or unemployed.

The review contains an excellent section that begins to address the human resources needs in the informal economy, but the “second economy” needs to be seen as part — if unequally — of the “first economy”. People move between these categories; they are linked in the same households and the boundaries between them shift over time. To understand human resource development in South Africa requires a rooting of research in the diverse ways of making a living.

This path-breaking review has begun such a task. By recommending the need for cross-sectoral linkages, it has laid the foundations for a decisive policy shift in our approach to human resource development. A central issue now is how, and by whom, these linkages are to be made.

Edward Webster is the director of the Sociology of Work unit at Wits University